Monday, September 26, 2011

At Nordstrom...

again, except this time it is the Nordstrom Medical Tower at Swedish for a visit to Seattle Radiology for an MRI this afternoon of her neck and right brachial plexus. Both of these are location areas which would generate nerve sensations resulting from tumors pressing on areas of the upper spine.Then we meet with Kaplan tomorrow morning at 9:00a.m. to discuss the results. Many things on the plate:

1. Brain tumor treatment - gamma knife this Thursday.
2. Discuss excision of tumor on her upper arm - she wants it out.
3. Start of chemotherapy.
4. What to do if there is anything showing up in the MRI.
5. Follow-up scans of tomo therapy treated spine.

Sequencing all this will be interesting...especially if she has to do chemo and radiation in parallel...

In the meantime it is just a lot to keep her apprised and steady. She was pretty upset last night as she knew she hadn't been thinking well yesterday and was having a hard time following things.
It was also a challenge this morning trying to figure out where her back pain was - the ibuprofen she's been on the last couple days to ease her arm pain has helped with her back (and knee) but she couldn't remember the location of the pain. Kind of makes it hard to figure out what areas to scan or whether to scan. And she can't remember the onset of the pain and whether it is fall-related or maybe cancer-related. I can see the difficulty ahead for many caregivers with loved ones who have memory issues  - just figuring out what is going on and where is hard. And you can't just do a full body scan whenever something is amiss.

Breathing slowly today....

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